Featherwing Love Intro

The Japanese is pronounced "haoto no ai" (if you can't read romaji, "hayoto no ayee" is close enough), and means most literally, "buzzing love".

Style note: Couldn't find anything with feathers, so I decided to borrow a bit from After Columbia Project, and use the Minima Black style from ACP...and yes, it's me...same person, different account. This might explain to the very few ACP regulars why "aftercolumbia" has suddenly gone away.

http://ascentroadmap.blogspot.com/
http://aftercolumbiamars.blogspot.com/

2 February 2009 (after exactly 6 years as "aftercolumbia"), I was listening to the Cascada Song, Everytime We Touch, and had a vision of what is now "Honeymoon Dance", two featherwing beings dancing with each other in midair. The wings magically deployed from their back during the first chorus line "everytime we kiss, I swear I could fly." I develop this into a 29 frame manga script.

Same day: First drawing of Haifun (I named her that day, but not with kanji.) It was impressive for the level of manga I was at (I had been drawing manga since 28 January, a whopping five days), but it sucked.

4 February 2009: I drew "Frame 11" and designed the wings. This is actually a fairly nice drawing, even from an objective perspective. This wing design has been superceded, but the span and average chord dimensions remain the same.

9 February 2009: I redrew Haifun in the same pose as I did on 2 February, a 3/4 portrait. It took me 90 minutes to do the pencil master. After I finished, I pulled back and looked at it, and sat there quite stunned at my first piece of pro-quality manga. A pen detail is online at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36560633@N04/3370747293/

I begin to develop a trace method because of a desire to protect my erasable pencil masters. I thought that this would also aid in scanning and combining different details from the same frame. This latter concept is a failure, but I still use it to preserve the pencil masters. You will see this when I complete the HD Frame 5 second edition. [This is the "portrait" image in my profiles] The primary remiges and their faces will be the same, but the wing design has been overhauled. HD-5 is the only drawing that had the old wing design in them that had any hope of being recovered after I redesigned the wings.

17 Feburary 2009: "Flying Romance", the original 29 frame dance, becomes Honeymoon Dance, the last (now third-from-last) chapter in an enormous and complex storyline. Flying Romance becomes my main project, replacing a previous manga project, and After Columbia Project.

This manga remains very modest; acts and details remain out of frame, under calf-length nighties with sleeves, under four foot long overlapping remiges, or some other method. I don't think I'll ever need to draw Haifun, or any other female character, with bared breasts. I also don't anticipate using the word "sex" during the manga, since we have come up with so many other ways to refer to the act, and I come up with another of my own (it's a spoiler, so I won't share it here.) The word "rape" is impossible to avoid if I want to avoid using the word "sex", since other methods of describing rape either use the word (sex attack, sexual assault), or ambiguous ("having his way with her"). Fortunately, pictures clean up the words (i.e.: in Ayashi no Ceres, Aya nearly gets raped three times...not counting Yuuhi...once in Vol. 6, twice in Vol. 10, and Ceres actually gets raped in a flashback in Vol. 13. This word is never found in the manga dialogue, although author/artist Yuu Watase may have used it in a sidebar...I say "may" because the translator has some latitude and my memory isn't precise either.)

Now, I must say that the story concept around Featherwing Love (at this time, "Flying Romance") orbits around Cascada's music. This time I was listening to Bad Boy this time. The vision was very, very painful and I cried. Haifun was being raped by the husband she had before Juubi, who she flies with in Honeymoon Dance. She escapes to the balcony, takes off her wedding ring, throws it against the planter, then climbs the railing as her husband emerges behind her. Crounched, she rotates over the railing, then pushes herself as far away from the building as possible. It is a high-rise condominium...she can't fly...this is her suicide. As the chorus begins, Juubi snatches her out of midair, but she is uncooperative. She doesn't want to live, and fights to escape her rescuer. Juubi can't maintain altitude. This vision wasn't going to resolve itself, and I knew Juubi needed to land. I thought about bushes, but eventually decided that it had to be an apartment window. Juubi's own wouldn't be open, so he pulls out a cell phone and calls a friend. He drops the phone as he approaches the window, which is sliding open in front of him. He flares and makes his wings disappear ("furls") just before he touches, tumbling forward across the room inside, letting go of Haifun as soon as they've stopped. Haifun shakes off the surreal feeling of the most recent two minutes of her life and suddenly realizes that they aren't the _last_ two minutes of her life. Juubi's friend is panicking, because he has seen Haifun's horrible injuries. Knowing they can't reveal the wings that carried her from her condo to his apartment, he realizes that they must face the possibility of taking the blame for those injuries. I storyboarded this almost immediately.

From 17 February to 15 March, I developed the entire story of their courtship, which ends with Juubi sharing his wings with Haifun, his new wife. It is a tremendously chaotic tale exploring how human (and featherwing) love, friendship, and lust works (Greek words, "agape", "phileos", and "eros"), and how they must agree in romance.

More later...

(Kisure's the friend who opened the window; I added his tag later)